Its god—if they exist—will know their own, so baby goes to heaven ("Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius").
If god doesn't exist—baby's trying to blackmail me, so fuck you, baby.
That's the same reply I'd give an adult evangelist who pulled this stunt: they chose to die on that hill, I didn't impose a choice on them. I admit I may be flying my ASD freak flag here.
@cstross I'd pull the baby's ripcord, then my own. Then once I landed I'd contact the Men In Black to complain about this alien masquerading as a human baby to play stupid practical jokes.
@Cassandra@tokensane It's an anti-abortion argument couched as metaphor ("pull rip-cord" = "continue pregnancy to term"). Clearly concocted by an evangelical type who at a gut deep level can't believe atheists don't secretly believe in Jeeezus.
@Cassandra@tokensane Absolutely elbow-deep in nonsense and doublethink! But if you interpret it as an anti-abortion metaphor it's internally consistent (even if the argument is full of holes).
And “pulling the rip-cord" is equivalent to continuing to term? The expression sounds violent / painful to me, so I would've expected them to assign it to abortion.
@cstross "Gotta pop out again honey, I got a text from that Christian baby again. Aparantly he's tying himself and other people to a trolley cart track and needs me there by 3pm sharp"
The whole question consists of falsities and deserves no answer.
An actual Christian (as in 'follower of Christ') would never initiate such a stunt; it would be contrary to the teachings they follow. A belief-consistent question to pose would be, "There is only one parachute and the Christian baby offered it to you without condition; would you take it?"
All that said? As far as I'm concerned there are very few actual Christians in the cohort of those who label themselves as such.
@cstross I don't know why this is the first Catholic post I find in my search. The point of making up scenarios is to prove a point, not just to entertain a morbid imagination.
@lawlawliett I wish I had a small games company at my disposal because I am now visualizing the casual game BABYSPLAT, in which you're kind of playing Lemmings but with babies that go SPLAT when dropped, and the goal is to keep them from falling through holes in the clouds long enough to convince the blob giving birth to them to Accept Jeezus into her heart. (At which point the babies still drop and go SPLAT, but then rise up to heaven on angel wings to the strains of "every sperm is sacred".)
@rubinjoni It's a deranged Christian allegory for an anti-abortion argument to use on atheists. (Which doesn't work, because atheists are not secretly Christians in disguise.)
@zaratustra The punishment (because this is an Xtian anti-abortion alegory) is you eschew the abortion you were going to get (by not pulling the rip cord) and run into 18+ years of raising an unwanted child for deadbeat absentee dad Jeezus.
@cstross I don't hear it over the 200m/s winds. I pull my own parachute at the appropriate time. The baby is strapped to me (and doesn't even have its own parachute), so it lands safely. I, the pilot, and the skydiving instructor are all banned from skydiving at that airport for allowing the baby to come with.
@cstross I’m not sure what is so hard about this one. The whole “talking, skydiving, baby” thing and the prompt to “imagine,” make clear that I am in cloud-cuckoo land.
Accordingly, I pull my ripcord, and after landing safely, I check my SpO2, and call my prescribing psychiatrist for a medication review, because something was making me hallucinate at a time that could have endangered my safety.
@bhawthorne Your "ailment" is that you're not a Christian fundamentalist who has been taught to think in alegory and turn their brains inside out in pursuit of an anti-abortion alegory for atheists, yet somehow can't comprehend the existence of atheists who genuinely don't believe in Jeezus. (They think every unbeliever is secretly a Christian who is only pretending in order to annoy them.)
@cstross Ohhh. This is their way of asking about abortion‽ That thought literally never entered my mind. Why do these fundies spend so much time fantasizing about abortion? Their preoccupation with one specific set of medical procedures is really bizarre. At least the Christian “Science” practitioners have the intellectual honesty to avoid all medical procedures.
So, what, they think this is some sort of “gotcha” question?
That would be like me posting:
Theists, imagine that you are on a trolley, and the driver is your devout pastor/minister/priest. Ahead you see an atheist lying on the tracks. There is enough time to stop the trolley. You shout, “Stop the trolley, there is someone on the tracks!” and your pastor says, “If it is God’s will that the person live, they will get off the tracks before we hit them. Anyone who interferes will burn in hell forever.” Then he hits the accelerator. What do you do?
Hmm. That’s actually not a bad answer to the parachuting baby question.
@krysztophe@bhawthorne Believers ARE very nearly atheists: they disbelieve in all gods/pantheia except the one they adhere to! It's just that they have a LOT invested in not recognizing that my disbelief in, say, Jesus, is similar to their disbelief in Odin or the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
@bhawthorne@cstross hold on, what's the terminal velocity of a baby in sky diving gear? It can't be that high. The baby is already way above me by the time I have idea what's going on.
So, assuming I am about 1.8 m in height and 0.3 m wide and weigh 100kg with gear, and falling so as to maximize my drag coefficient, my terminal velocity is going to be about 50 m/s. If I dive headfirst, that would be 100 m/s.
For the baby, assuming they weigh 15kg with gear (most of that is gear), are about 0.3m tall and about 0.15m wide, and also falling flat, their terminal velocity is about 75 m/s. Diving head first would be about 135 m/s. The baby, after being thrown out of the plane with a parachute, is unlikely to have the motor control to manage a belly down, arms spread position and is more likely to be curled in a ball in the fetal position. That would put its terminal velocity at 120 m/a or greater.
In other words, the baby is going to fall like a proverbial rock and within 15 seconds is going to be out of sight and hearing range, even if I had tried to dive after it. And since I’m going to be focused on slowing myself down to enjoy the jump, it is going to going to plummet even faster than that relative to me.
So, as we jump/are tossed out of the airplane, what I hear over the wind noise from the baby is, “i’m a Christian baby, and I <inaudible>”. I think “Holy Shit! Someone threw a talking baby out of the airplane. And the first thing it tells me is that it is Christian? WTF is happening? Oh well. There is goes.”
@bhawthorne@NiftyLinks@cstross But the baby has enough agency to (a) talk, (b) reason, (c) pull its own ripcord - I think we can assume both that it has enough motor control to fall to match your velocity and that it has enough agency to make its own decisions and is therefore not technically a baby in terms of helplessness and need for protection.
At this point it's more likely to be an alien disguised as a baby than an actual baby.
All we know from the question is that something that looks like a baby is falling out of a plane while I am skydiving and that it is talking nonsense. Occam’s razor suggests I am being pranked and someone has thrown a BLO (baby-like-object) after me, and that the BLO includes a playback device or a remote speaker. That’s far more likely than a skydiving, talking baby or an extraterrestrial. Actually, since I don’t skydive, most likely I am having a nightmare.
In any case, my initial reaction is still gonna be “WTF!” At which point the BLO has plummeted out of sight. If it doesn’t plummet out of sight, then I grab the BLO, fly back up to the airplane, toss it through the hatch, and resume my skydiving until I wake up.
@bhawthorne@robotistry@NiftyLinks@cstross Maybe this mysterious BLO is actually a cat in disguise. Cats can fall from any heights and survive the shock. And this whole shenanigans feels like something a really messed up talking cat could do.
@muetdhiver@bhawthorne@robotistry@NiftyLinks Mmph: cats are borderline! Landing at terminal velocity is 50-60% likely to be fatal for a cat—depending on the surface. (Soil, snow, or sand: likely survivable. Concrete or rock: likely broken bones or worse.) Weirdly, if they fall a long way they go limp and are slightly likelier to survive. Humans can survive a long fall if the surface they land on is something like a snow drift. Cows? They're worse than humans at falling: they splash.
@cstross I'd pull the baby's ripcord for him. He's been indoctrinated into a toxic ideology that values embracing supernatural beliefs more than life itself. That's not his fault, and there's hope that he can change.
@bodhipaksa Oh, I locked it for followers only. Here's the contents:
It's a Christian anti-abortion argument for use on pregnant atheists ("baby" = unborn fetus, "parachute" = continue pregnancy to term, "accept Jesus" = refuse an abortion). It only works if you believe the Invisible Sky Daddy gives his followers a happy afterlife. It has plenty of flaws, principally begging the question. And the argument collapses if the pregnant person has a life-threatening condition or fetus is non-viable.
A talking toddler? While skydiving? Who is mostly concerned with Theology? This is nuts in multiple ways.
A person ahem aged 10 or under who has a firm religious belief system inevitably got it from their parents and upbringing. Saying that it's the child's belief system is a misrepresentation. They haven't formed their own adult opinion yet.
@cstross My first question here is why is a baby skydiving in the first place? Where are the parents? Also, it is a baby - what's stopping me from just pulling its rip cord and then going to the pub to tell people about the really weird day I just had?
Not to mention, how on Earth did I end up skydiving to begin with?
@lordmatt You missed the follow-up. (It's a contorted Christian anti-abortion metaphor—the "baby" is an unborn fetus, the ripcord is continuing the pregnancy to term, and the subtext is the usual moral blackmail these dipshits go in for on the basis of spurious patriarchal theology and blind faith.)
@cstross if it's old enough to talk and decide things like that it's definitely not a baby. :p It's the baby or whoever brainwashed its choice. If it has any common sense it'll pull the rip cord after it sees I'm not going to fall for it and pull mine. Otherwise I guess it's Darwinism at work. :p
@Sharan Turns out it's a Christian anti-abortion argument in metaphor drag (baby = unborn fetus, parachute = continue an unwanted pregnancy, baby splatted across landscape = an abortion). Once you recognize it as an anti-abortion argument that presupposes you believe in Jeeeeezus, refuting it is trivial. (Especially if you take the Jewish position that an actual pregnant person's well-being is worth more than a not-yet-existing person, so it's their right to choose.)
@morix It's an anti-abortion metaphorical argument. (baby = unborn fetus.) "Pull the ripcord" = continue your pregnancy to term, unconditionally (no arguing whether the fetus is viable, the mother's life is in danger, or any heed for the next 18+ years of hard work raising an unwanted child). Luckily it's a totally stupid argument and easily refuted once you see through the obfustication.
(Pointing this out because A LOT of folks in their replies took it at face value, missing the metaphor.)
@Lazarou@Cassandra Yes but the Adams Whale was a side-effect of the Infinite Improbability Drive on the Heart of Gold, and in any case is more probable than Talking Evangelical Baby Sky-Divers!
(Fx: somewhere a Christian is grinding their teeth to splinters because of all the overly-literal autistic folks who can't see the baby is an allegory and refuse to save it anyway even though they think it's a literal sky-diving baby.)
(It took me nearly 50 years to finally reflexively swallow my detailed answer and say "I'm fine, how are you?" ... which completes the expected protocol handshake.)
@cstross With these scenarios I can't get past the talking baby. I presume they use a baby so you'd be harming an innocent, however if it can talk, is Christian, and can make threats it's most definitely not a baby nor innocent.
@Chigaze No, it's an anti-abortion metaphor. You are pregnant, the baby is inside you, if you abort it you're splatting it on the landscape, if you accept Jeeezus then of course you're going to raise your baby Christian ... this is how they [don't] think.
Add comment